Allegations of irregularities in the recruitment of civil judges in Haryana-Punjab
Chandigarh | 13 Feb 2023
Allegations of malpractices have come to the fore in the recruitment of civil judges in Haryana and Punjab. These allegations have been made by the Chandigarh Judicial Aspirants Union. Union held a press conference on Monday at Chandigarh Press Club in which they said that irregularities were done in the exam. He said that the rules of selection have been flouted. Candidates are discriminated in both written test and interview. He said that many times the exam is conducted so quickly that the candidates do not get time to prepare.
A petition was filed in the Supreme Court regarding the alleged discrepancies in the results of the recruitment of judges, but the Hon'ble court quickly dismissed the same.
Union informed that out of total 3111 question papers were evaluated by table marking in each of the two languages. One evaluator for each paper in 23 days, effectively evaluating one paper in less than 3 minutes. How is it possible to do justice to marking.
Coming to the interview, the following irregularities are evident:
1. Many meritorious candidates who scored high marks in the written examination were given low marks in the interview. While those who get less marks in the written test were given more marks in the interview. A candidate who secured 4th position by scoring 531 marks out of 900 in the written examination was given only 7 marks out of 200 in the interview due to which he failed. There are 9 candidates who scored more than 500 marks in the written test but were given less than 30 marks in the interview.
*this is how the error happened*
, Out of 455 candidates who appeared in the interview, only 22 candidates scored more than 100 marks.
- 324 candidates were given less than 60 marks
- 274 candidates were given less than 50 marks
There are 55 candidates who secured more than 470 marks in the written test but failed because they were given less than 65 marks in the interview.
Reserved category candidates were interviewed separately in violation of the fundamental right to equality.The interviews for 200 marks were of only 3 to 7 minutes whereas as per the recommendations of the Justice Jagannath Shetty Commission, the interviews should be of 25-30 minutes.
*There were no principles for the interview*
The RTI replies revealed that there were no guiding principles for conducting the interviews. Nor were there any guidelines for uniformity of questions. The proceedings of the interview were neither recorded nor noted. Many of the unsuccessful candidates are working as civil judges, or assistant public prosecutors, or lecturers in law in other states, or gold medalists in post graduate courses (LLM) in their respective universities. An unsuccessful candidate was subsequently selected as Additional District Judge in two other states in direct selection. The above analysis reveals that either there is something seriously wrong with the marking scheme at the level of Main Examination